The residents of an early 18th century village live happily, keeping a truce with the unknown creatures of the woods. But something has upset the nameless beings, and worse, someone may have to break the pact and enter the forest.
In The Sixth Sense, M. Night Shyamalan gave us one of the great twist endings. Perhaps what made it so great was that the film would have worked without it. There was an engaging story and character development. The ending made an excellent film great.
But The Village is another matter; there is nothing here but the ending. There is no plot except a huge arrow pointing at that twist ending. I can hardly call this a movie. It is just an ending. So, if two hours of developed film stock rely on a few minutes of surprise to make it worthwhile, then that better be one great surprise, something unexpected, clever, and thoughtful. Sadly, it is none of those things. Within a few minutes of my first glimpse of those happy farm folk, I had come up with three simplistic endings that a poor screen writer would use (I won’t say what these are as it would give away too much for any of you foolish enough to care). I then hoped that Shyamalan would not use any, but come up with something I wouldn’t expect. And if he couldn’t manage that, to at least avoid the least interesting of the three. No such luck. He went right for the least imaginative one. It’s hardly even a twist. It’s one step away from nothing at all happening, and in the end, that is the result, a complete absence of a story. It doesn’t matter that character motivation is lacking and lines are read with a flatness seldom heard outside accounting offices; those are minor offences by comparison.